Whitey Bulger’s new home is its own little world’

When Brockton attorney Joseph Krowski Jr., visits most clients in jail, they are released from their unit and allowed to walk to a designated lawyer’s room inside the facility.

Unit G of the Plymouth County House of Corrections is a different animal.

By Matt Stout

The Herald News, Fall River, MA

By Matt Stout

Posted Jun. 28, 2011 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jun 28, 2011 at 5:09 PM

By Matt Stout

Posted Jun. 28, 2011 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jun 28, 2011 at 5:09 PM

PLYMOUTH

» Social News

When Brockton attorney Joseph Krowski Jr., visits most clients in jail, they are released from their unit and allowed to walk to a designated lawyer’s room inside the facility.

Unit G of the Plymouth County House of Corrections is a different animal.

When Krowski visits his client Keith Luke – the self-proclaimed white supremacist from Brockton accused of killing two people and critically injuring another in 2009 – he is led down a 200-plus-foot hallway to an area directly inside the unit.

Once there, he is met by several guards, and his client is later escorted in, his ankles and hands shackled. It’s one of the few times prisoners in the unit are allowed out of the tiny cells, where they spend 23 hours a day. Three times a week they’re allowed to change clothes, shower and for a 20-minute period, shave.

Krowski considers the unit “cruel and inhumane punishment.”

It’s also home for James “Whitey” Bulger, at least for now.

Bulger, the alleged South Boston gangster arrested last week after 16 years on the lam, is being housed in the maximum security portion of the facility while awaiting his fate on charges connected to 19 murders.

The Enterprise visited the cell block in 2009, chronicling the “jail within a jail” and its 8-by-12-foot cells, restraint chairs and intense isolation.

Unit G holds up to 117 prisoners who are either removed from general population because they did something wrong or held there because they are at risk of being harmed or harming others.

It’s residents have included spree killer and Abington native Gary Sampson, who is now on death row in a federal penitentiary in Terra Haute, Ind.; Richard Hatch, who won $1 million in the debut season of the reality show “Survivor” and was later convicted of failure to pay taxes on his winnings; and shoe bomber Richard Reid, who tried to detonate a bomb aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in 2001.

New England mobsters Stephen J. “The Rifleman” Flemmi and Frank “Cadillac Frank” Salemme had also spent time in the unit.

Prisoners are not only limited in their contact with other inmates, but also in access to legal materials and exercise, said Krowski, who made unsuccessful attempts to get Luke transferred from the unit.

“That 23-hour lockdown does a terrible number on one’s mental and emotional stability,” he said.

Within their cells, prisoners sleep on a 41/2-inch thick, rubber-covered mattress on a metal slab. A stainless steel toilet sits nearby, the door with its small, Plexiglas window just feet away.

During the hour they aren’t confined to the room, prisoners are allowed to walk in the common area or exercise in the nearby recreational area. There’s also a small area where inmates can talk with visitors via phone while separated by a partition.

Page 2 of 2 - In many ways, the unit runs as its own entity. On the first floor, two officers stand guard outside the four locked cellblock clusters, just below a second-floor metal grate platform where other officers monitor the area.

Those guarding the prisoners do not routinely use the radio system connecting other sections of the jail. They call, instead, to each other through the grate floor.

“If there is any type of disturbance here, we don’t want inmates in other units to know,” John Hickey, the Plymouth County sheriff’s department captain in charge of the unit, told The Enterprise in 2009. “The prisoners will stand next to the officers sometimes and listen to what is being said on the radio.”

If there is a disturbance, riot gear, including shields, helmets and gas masks, is also stored nearby.

A side office also houses “restraint chairs,” used when prisoners act up or are at risk of hurting themselves. A hair net-like hat that covers an inmate’s face is used to stop spittle from striking officers.

And it’s all tucked into the southwest section of the facility, the last, alphabetically listed unit in the jail.